They booed a Chavista minister in Caracas for naming Maduro in a religious act

Carmen Meléndez, Minister of the Interior and Justice of the Chavista regime in Venezuela, was booed this Friday for having named Nicolás Maduro during the presentation of the statue in Caracas of the beatified doctor José Gregorio Hernández, popularly known as “the doctor of the poor” and to whom parishioners frequently ask to intercede for them to be healed.

The minister was speaking about the Venezuelan doctor who was born in 1864 and died in 1919, when she said that Maduro had commissioned the statue and people who were concentrated in the vicinity of Plaza La Candelaria hissed and shouted in rejection of its mention on a day long awaited for decades by millions of Venezuelan Catholics.

José Gregorio Hernández, venerated as a saint in Venezuela, he was beatified this Friday.

“With our apostolic authority, we grant that the venerable Servant of God José Gregorio Hernández Cisneros, a faithful layman, expert in science and excellent in the faith (…), is henceforth called blessed”, declared the Apostolic Nuncio, Aldo Giordano, in a small act in the chapel of a school in Caracas.

“Long live José Gregorio!” Cried the present, while a mosaic of the “servant of God” with his iconic black costume, doctor’s coat and stethoscope, and a halo on his head.

Only 150 people attended the act of beatification of José Gregorio Hernández, closed to the public due to the covid-19 pandemic, which overwhelms hospitals in Venezuela with a second virulent wave. The access roads to the La Salle La Colina school were closed by the police and the military.

However, dozens of faithful went to emblematic sites of the cult of the new blessed.

Thousands of people in Venezuela claim to have been saved by him, but It was not until June 2020 that Pope Francis signed the decree of beatification after approving “the miracle” of Yaxury Solórzano, who at 10 years old survived a very serious gunshot wound in 2017. He was declared venerable 35 years ago.

“I felt emotion, tranquility, peace,” Yaxury said on state television, wearing a white liqui-liqui (traditional Venezuelan costume), after the act of beatification.

In central Caracas, the bells of the church of La Candelaria rang, Hernández’s resting place from 1975 until October of last year, when he was exhumed for beatification.

At the corner of Hérnandez’s death, in La Pastora, believers placed flowers next to a wall painting framed with the Venezuelan flag.

According to press reports, the faithful made a pilgrimage about 12 km to Isnotú, Hernández’s hometown, to leave flowers on the monuments in honor of the blessed.

Three Venezuelans had been declared blessed by the Catholic Church before the “doctor of the poor” – the nuns María de San José, Candelaria de San José and Carmen Rendiles – but none was a saint.

Pope Francis said on Thursday that he hoped the beatification would help Venezuela’s “reconciliation”., a country struck by a serious political and economic crisis, and “to produce together the response of the common good so necessary for the country to revive itself, to be reborn after the pandemic”.

With information from AFP

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